The present invention relates to managing access to resources and/or services using customer information. More specifically, the invention relates to utilizing customer configurations that include information on the network wide resources that are available for the customer.
In almost any consumer market, if the cost of buying an item is high, it can be profitable to buy the item and lease it to others. We are all very familiar with this concept when we move because no one would think of buying a moving van; it makes much more sense to rent one from a rental company. Although there are many other situations where it makes good business sense to lease equipment, one that is becoming increasingly more prevalent is the leasing of communications equipment.
Communications hardware can be costly for companies to purchase, but there are some other factors that make leasing even more attractive. As a company grows (or shrinks), the company may require more (or less) bandwidth for communications. For this reason, communications companies are increasingly offering solutions that allow customers to scale their bandwidth with their needs.
As an example, Internet service providers (ISPs) require increasingly more equipment as their companies grow. ISPs that offer dial up connections will need increasingly more modems as the number of users increases. In addition to the cost of buying more equipment is the associated cost (and time) of integrating the new equipment into the existing hardware infrastructure. It is for these and other reasons that many ISPs lease these resources from another provider.
A network access server (NAS) is a system that provides clients with dial access to a network. Continuing with the example of an ISP that provides users with dial up connections to the Internet, a NAS would typically include a trunk card to receive multiple trunk lines from a public switched telephone network (PSTN) and multiple modems. The cost of a NAS may make it more cost effective for an ISP to lease a certain number of modems of a NAS (or multiple NASs) instead of purchasing the NAS. In addition to lowering the initial cost, the ISP can increase the number of simultaneous connections by leasing more modems.
As leasing resources becomes more prevalent, what is needed are techniques for managing access to resources, such as in NASs. It would also be beneficial to have techniques of dynamically allocating resources so that over subscription is possible, but also allows more efficient use of the resources. Additionally, it would be beneficial to screen access attempts so that known unauthorized access attempts will not tie up the resources.